An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 10:40:08PM +0200, Jan Claeys wrote:

> Like I said on that blog post, another meaning of the word rape (and
> actually the *original* meaning, as derived from Latin), and of the
> Dutch translation of it (the author is Dutch), has nothing specifically
> to do with sexual harassment.  Even if it's mostly used in the last
> meaning these days (especially in popular media & daily speech), there
> is no reason for the Ubuntu project to try to change the English
> language and extinguish the original _unoffensive_ meaning completely by
> marking the word as "might possibly be interpreted as offensive by
> someone".

And, like I said, that's not how it's going to be interpreted in 
English. It's not Ubuntu that's trying to alter the English language - 
it's the people using it. And, yes, language changes over time.

> [...]
> > And it's not just women - there are many 
> > different cultures that we can accidently discourage. Jokes about the 
> > holocaust would probably be considered to be similarly poor taste.
> 
> To me such jokes are only of poor taste when told by someone who takes
> them serious, but I can also see why some people will always be offended
> by them (I hope those people never go see a Jewish comedian though).

In specific contexts, I think they're probably entirely acceptable. But 
those specific contexts are generally where you have a good idea of who 
your audience are. That's not the case on public mailing lists, it's not 
the case on public IRC channels and it's not the case on sites like 
Planet. Anyone contributing to any of these needs to be very aware of 
how their use of language may cause offense.

> BTW: It seems like some people in Asia consider the term "FLOSS" to
> bring bad luck, who's going to remove the more than 1000 occurrences of
> that from ubuntu.com, so that we don't offend those Asian people
> anymore?  (Please don't!)

The fact that something in English is offensive if moved directly into a 
foreign language isn't a good argument for changing it. On the other 
hand, if it's offensive and we're including it directly in foreign 
translations, then we probably need to reconsider that.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org